Literature: Love like this doesnt come easy

Glenroe actress turned writer Kate Thompson is a world away from the Barbara Cartland school of romantic novelists, says Mick Heaney

Kate Thompson is not afraid of hard work. It is a point the Belfast-born novelist reiterates time and again, and lest anyone doubt her, she has the books to prove it. Since her first novel was published in 1998 she has averaged a book a year. Of late, however, she has been busy even by her own standards.

Her sixth novel, A Perfect Life, has just gone into paperback. Her seventh, Living the Dream, is due to be published in October. Her eighth, Sex, Lies and Fairytales, is already finished and with her editors, in preparation for its first print run in autumn next year. If Thompson bristles at the pejorative overtones of “romantic novelist”, the term sometimes applied to her, it may be because she sees precious little romance in her overworked creative life.

“It’s not Barbara Cartland stuff. I’m not dictating it from the chaise longue while eating